What follows is an essay by Rick’s son, Max Roderick about Rick’s legacy as a teacher and a father. It answers many of the questions that come up in the comments from time to time, and plenty that don’t. Reprinted with permission from Dagger Magazine.

Part 1: The Claim of the Dead

If I could only share
one fragment of my father’s work, it would be this story from his
half-finished autobiography:

“It was a rainy Saturday night and I closed the hamburger stand a
few minutes early. Two girls I had never met were visiting Buffalo
Gap and they wanted to go on one of the drives they had heard about.
Rita and Tate were very attractive and a year or two younger than I
was. They were sisters and would be in town for a month while their
father looked for work and considered the possibility of moving to
Abilene. They knew Cynthia, a Gap girl who nearly always joined the
crowd for a late night ride. Along with Danny and Randy, the ’57
Chevy was soon full of giggling girls and excited boys. We pulled
out into the night and the rain and I played the radio full blast.
No one paired off into couples, but everyone seemed to like everyone
else. The new girls were funny and smart and I especially liked
Rita, with her short brown hair and twinkling eyes. I tried to talk
to her and drive at the same time, but it caused me to go slower and
everyone thought I should go faster. So I did. We passed some Dr.
Pepper around and Randy called for beer, but we had none. The radio
was playing The Rolling Stones and they wanted to ‘paint it black…’
It was fine rock ‘n’ roll and Cynthia moved to it although seated.

“I do not remember when I realized that I was lost. I knew almost
all the roads around the whole county, but I had never been on this
one. I slowed the ’57 Chevy down and tried to see through the light
fog and rain. Rita and Tate kept putting their heads out of the car
window, yelling, and letting the rain fall on them. Up ahead I saw
an ancient railroad underpass and I slowed the car a bit more. I
would need to turn slightly on the dirt and gravel road to make it
through. When I moved the steering wheel, the car drifted some. It
could not have been more than a foot or two. The ’57 did not hit the
underpass, but I knew immediately that something horrible had
happened. I could hear everyone screaming in an awful, inhuman way.
It felt like it was raining inside the car, a flood of sticky liquid.
I turned to look and Rita’s headless body was shaking like a
hideous cartoon character. A long and rusty steel bolt jutting out
from the railroad trestle had taken her head off as she stuck it out
of the car window into the rain. The smell of death was everywhere.
It smelled like dirt and vomit and spoiled buttermilk. The amount of
blood was unbelievable. I could feel my senses shutting down and the
onset of deep shock. I stumbled out of the car and pulled Cynthia
with me. I tried to turn back for the others, but I simply could
not. I started walking down the road to get help, although what help
could do now I had no idea. I do not remember how long it took me to
get to the nearest farm, the Rackow place. They went for the
telephone as soon as they saw me. The next thing I remembered was
waking up in the almost perfect white of a hospital room.

“Everything seemed unreal. I could not focus my mind and I
actually wondered if I was dead. Some flashes of the accident would
come back to me, but only as gruesome fragments. Finally, a nurse
came in to check on me. She took my blood pressure and my
temperature and smiled weakly at me. ‘How long have I been here?’ I
asked. ‘Three days,’ she said. It was hard to believe. I
remembered none of it. After she left, El [Rick’s mother, Elwin
Roderick] came in. I was glad to see her. She explained to me how I
had almost died from the shock, how the other kids were still in the
hospital too, and how we would be getting out in the next day or so.
I tried to follow what she was saying, but it was very hard. ‘She’s
dead,’ I said. ‘Yes, son, she is,’ El replied. I began to cry
quietly and for a long time. Finally, I was still. ‘When is the
funeral?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ El said. She knew I would
find a way to go, so she did not try to argue with me. The doctors
may have felt the same way too, because I was released early enough
in the morning to make it to the funeral. Rod [Rick’s father]
brought me a black suit borrowed from Tim Kelley and it almost fit.
I dressed carefully and then walked out on my own. The early morning
air was cold on my face. Had the seasons changed while I was gone?
I looked back at the hospital, speckled with lights in the predawn
dark. I felt shaky, so El helped me get in Rod’s truck. We drove
in silence away from there and down to the highway and back toward
Buffalo Gap.

“It was a graveside service and half of Taylor County was there. I
stood away from the crowd, but I could feel people looking at me. I
did not see any of the other kids from the accident, but I did see
Mickey and Sharon. They walked up to me and stood on either side
like guardians. I wanted to say something very quietly to them, but
I could not. The Baptist preacher from Abilene said a prayer and the
music began. It was a single bass voice, singing ‘Amazing grace, how
sweet the sound…’ I could see the lovely young girl’s family
crying. Her mother was inconsolable. It was cold that morning and
all the voices made trails in the air. I shivered inside deep.
‘That saved a wretch like me…’ I wanted to hide from myself and
from the world. The song trailed away and the preacher began. He
explained how God let things happen for reasons that we did not
understand but that it was all for the best in the overall scheme of
things and how we would learn from it and go to heaven. Everything
he said was absolutely crazy. Did anyone actually believe it? Did
he? The words made me angry and I wanted to tell him how nothing in
this world or out of it would ever make up for the horrible death of
this young girl. I wanted to say how I would rather be dead myself
than carry the guilt of having killed her for the rest of my life.
But I did not say anything. I could not even cry. I looked up, but
the sky was empty.”

The closing sentences
of the book, entitled Bury Me Not, belong equally to my father
as he was and to the mythology he encouraged and inspired. In the
narrative, Martin Luther King Jr. has just been killed:

“I was alone the night of his death, because I did not want to be
with my new white friends, the Yankees, and I did not have the right
to be with my new black friends. I did not have the right because I
had not fought hard enough or long enough or bold enough. Not yet.
And so the dead call to the living and lay their claim upon them.”

Rick Roderick’s
unfinished account of his own life closes there, in the middle of
April, 1968, with that suspicious non-sequitur. The rest of the story
is up to the living to set straight.

I am Rick’s youngest
son, and was five years old when he was denied tenure at Duke
University and the administration informed him he would not be asked
to continue teaching the following year. My father’s lectures had
been recorded, and were released nationally on cassette tape by The
Teaching Company. They were selling well. Rick’s book on Habermas had
been warmly received by philosophers and was published in five
countries. When Rick lost tenure and his teaching position, he found
that these achievements meant little for his future prospects.

Without the security of
tenure, an academic philosopher must live an itinerant and unreliable
life, teaching for hire at the pleasure of any institution in need of
lecturers. Rick, then in his forties, had four sons to support. He’d
put in about a decade pursuing Duke’s tenure track, and starting over
elsewhere was practically impossible. Shortly after the firing, Rick
returned to his old friends in Texas and took my brothers and I with
him. It was in Texas, just after the turn of the century, that he
would die.

After the death of Rita
Shull, my father writes that he “pushed [his] unschooled mind as
far and as fast as it could go and still, felt lost,” beginning the
inquiries that would eventually lead him to his profession. Bury
Me Not gives the impression that
my father was a boy who wandered too far and too fast one night,
driven by his own hand from a world that made firm, youthful sense to
one that had no direction and no meaning. “It was too late,”
he wrote, “there was no road back.”

Rita was buried in
Buffalo Gap by her mother, father, and siblings in May, 1966. Rita’s
mother lived to see all her children die, and nobody whatsoever
remains of her family line. My brothers and I remain for Rick, at
least, as do a community of devotees influenced by his philosophy.
Rick believed that the horrifying tasks of life can be made most
bearable by the conscious and casual exercise of reason, and many
people have since agreed.

Each of us owe
something to that fourteen year old girl and to that accident in
Buffalo Gap. To the nagging pains that outlive whatever we learn,
whatever we love, until the pain itself becomes our only solid
foundation for living. If there is any commonality among Rick’s
followers, it is some version of this essential wound. Rick’s death
defined my character, and Rita’s death must have been a large part of
his. History, in the words of T. S. Eliot, has many cunning passages.

Mickey, the boy who
stood beside Rick at Rita Shull’s funeral, had been close to Rick
since early childhood. They paid for the old Chevy in which she died
and built it together, piece by piece. Buffalo Gap in the early
sixties was a brutal community and Mickey was one of the only kids
willing to protect Rick from abuse. My father wasn’t bullied in the
modern sense; he endured beatings. Once, after his white family
invited a trio of black baseball players to visit and play in their
league, someone even shot Rick’s dog through his bedroom window in
the middle of the night.

Bury Me Not contains
a recollection of a hunting trip Rick and Mickey took together:

“That December, Mickey and I borrowed a couple of Winchester
Saddle Guns, rounded up a week’s worth of provisions, and went deer
hunting. Our parents thought we were old enough not to shoot each
other and that seemed to be the primary issue. Mickey’s dad
provided the horses, if you could call those two swaybacked nags
horses, and we left for the hill country of Lemons Gap, twenty or
more miles from town and from school. We had both been hunting with
Mickey’s dad before, but this would be our first trip on our own.
Rod did not like hunting, so he took us fishing. Although we had
caught plenty of fish and killed squirrels and rabbits and birds,
neither of us had our first deer. So this trip was a kind of
necessity and we truly enjoyed the riding and the camping out and
being on our own. We took two days to get to the higher country and
we took it easy on our horses, riding them slow and feeding them
generously and often. We would stop at dark and camp. We would
build a fire to keep the cold away and lay our ropes around the camp
on the dubious grounds that rattlesnakes would not crawl over them.
We would talk until late into the night and sometimes just sit and
look at the sky and say nothing for hours. I would get up in the
morning and throw a few small branches on to restart the fire and
then cook scrambled eggs and salt pork and potatoes all together in
our skillet. Mickey would make the coffee, strong and black. We
would eat enormous amounts, sit back, and smoke the Camel cigarettes
Mickey brought along. It was a great feeling. Some snow came on our
third night out, and by the fourth it was white and icy cold in
Lemons Gap. We were close to prepared for the weather, but we
decided it might be best to tie the horses carefully and go start up
Devil’s Hill and make ourselves a deer blind. So we did. We sat
nervously in the little stand of limbs and branches and looked out
for deer crossing down into the Jim Ned Valley below. The first one
came at ten o’clock or so that morning. Mickey could not get a
good shot from the far-left side of the blind, so I waited and got
ready. He was a beautiful animal, almost beyond description, with a
tall and proud eight-point rack. I felt a dizzy sensation, which I
recognized as what they call ‘Buck fever,’ some primal reaction to
the mere act of killing the innocent. But it was not overpowering
and so I shook it off and looked hard at the movements of the deer,
almost still and less than eighty yards away. I leveled the rifle
and used a tree branch to steady my hand. I fired and hit him heart
high, killing him almost at once. The sound of the shot echoed in
the hills and some snow fell off the branches around us. I was
silent and I could hear my heart beat. Mickey scrambled out of the
blind and said, ‘You can shoot, son.’ We dragged the deer down
almost to our camp and it took both of us to hang his carcass in a
crooked mesquite. ‘You clean him. I am going to go back and try to
get one,’ Mickey said. I cut the deer’s throat with my Buck Knife
and let him bleed out. I filled my coffee cup with some of the blood
and sat it by. Mickey’s dad had showed me how to field dress a
deer and I followed the routine he taught me as closely as possible.
I stripped his skin, cleaned out his stomach, and packed the cold
snow inside him. I used the snow to clean some of the blood off
myself. It took me a long time and I remember it was late afternoon
when I heard the report of Mickey’s rifle followed quickly by a
second shot. I went up the trail until I saw him. He had his deer.
We brought the second one down and field dressed him together.
Mickey saved a cup of his blood, as I had. We finished just as it
was almost too dark to continue. The next day we would drag the deer
down to Silver Valley, only a few hours away, on litters made
Indian-style from tree limbs. Mickey’s father would come to get
the horses, our kills, and us. But that night, we pulled out the
steaming cups of deer blood and the snow hit our faces and we drank
down the spirit of the deer, if you happen to believe in such things,
and it was warm and very salty. We cut a small line in our palms
with the Buck Knife and shook hands, blood brothers and fellow
killers.

Rick went to college at the University of
Texas at Austin. It was there, attending a lecture by Herbert
Marcuse, where he would discover critical theory and begin his
studies of philosophy qua philosophy. According to Tom Zigal, another
of Rick’s close friends
(the book on Habermas is dedicated, in part, to him) there was a bit
of graffiti in the bathroom of one of the campus bars, called the
Hole in the Wall. It read:

I
grew up in Austin and visited the Hole in the Wall in my early
twenties. I was with a girl I barely knew, trying hard not to be
bored, and the stalls had no answers for me. My Texas was no longer
the place circumscribed by my father’s mythology, yet that quotation
is the same sort of romantic thing I would have said about it myself
when I was younger. In this way we are alike, though I went to Middle
School in suburbia while he was drinking down the spirit of his kill.

Rick
loved quotations. He used his computer to play clips from movies
before even the sites that prefigured YouTube were invented. Most of
his favorite quips were taken from westerns, and it was never out of
place to hear him respond to his unruly children with the words of
Kurt Douglas or Gregory Peck. This is a story of quotations. I’ve
tried to let you in on the context as much as possible, but there’s a
hell of a lot of it.

Bury
Me Not bears
a subtitle: “And Night Fell Over Texas.” Rick’s sky may have been
empty, but his soil was full. The state, for him, was a hardscrabble
land of limitless fascination: a territory whose natives, no matter
their race or their profession, were bound together by a slow and
almost Grecian doom. Rick’s response to this fatalism was always
off-handed and sardonic. One of his favorite phrases to repeat was
“Life sucks, and then you die.” Even die-hard optimists must
admit to this caveat.

Joanna
Newsom, in her song Emily,
promises a loved one that she will commit the difference between
meteorites and meteoroids to memory. Because of the song that
fulfills that promise I too have memorized “that the meteorite is
the source of the light, and the meteor’s just what we see. And the
meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to
thee.”

Emily, Rita, Mickey – Rick. These were the sources of light. I can only tell you what I see.

Part 2: The Self Under Siege

My father holds a
well-deserved reputation as a teacher of philosophy. He is best known
for three lecture series released on video and cassette tape by The
Teaching Company in the early 1990s. Today you can listen to them at
RickRoderick.org, a repository of information about Rick, his
philosophy and his termination from Duke.

The site was started
and is maintained by a man named Chris Laurence. Laurence never met
Rick himself. He just heard the lectures, and wanted to transcribe
them for his own reference. Without him, without the site, I would
never have been able to listen to my father in the exercise of his
profession.

In the final part of
The Self Under Siege, Rick’s series on twentieth century
philosophy, he discusses the intellectual vertigo produced in human
beings as they rush deeper into the information age. In this
purgatorial state, the major obstacle between humans and reality is
not a lack of information, but an excess of it. I am bombarded by
information, little of it useful, and the result is a muddled
existence staggering between lies, half-truths and scraps of
propaganda. It is never clear whose truth we are consuming, or for
what reasons it has been offered.

Take that quote from
The Hole in the Wall as an example. In their college days, Tom Zigal
would take Rick and my mother Irene to that bar to listen to his
brother Frank play folk songs. They did it almost every weekend. They
shared the graffiti then, but it was Tom who remembered it, and
suggested Rick use it in Bury Me Not. I do not know who wrote
that little poem about Texas or where they got it from, but I can
give you a personal genealogy of its quotation, a record which must
now necessarily include this essay. The current state of mass media
turns everything into that sincerely read graffiti; a chorus of
quotations put to various uses by obscured authors; words robbed of
invention, of person. “Everything in Texas either burns, bites,
stings or breaks your heart.” In these words I feel both the
necessity and the burden of heritage.

Twenty-First century
humans no longer live on reality’s ground floor. To even get a
glimpse of reality we must sift through and decipher so much
information that by the time we discern what is “real,” it is
often no longer particularly relevant.

Rick took on the task
of boiling down western philosophy to its most significant, critical,
and above all, useful ideas. I found each one relevant in my own
life. My father’s ideas pushed at the boundaries of my understanding,
and I am not the only one. Rick was a captivating speaker and writer,
a skill he considered paramount, and cultivated with purpose.
Knowledge, for him, was useless if it could not be shared, and his
greatest talent was in sharing knowledge in the form of a story that
was always compelling, whether it dealt with our best, worst, or
dullest natures.

In the first part of
The Self Under Siege, Rick raises the possibility that the
path towards self-definition in the information age has reached a
level of complexity that makes it impossible. Rick gives the example
of the JFK assassination. Our record of that event, compared to
historical events preceding it, is thick with new complexity and
superfluous detail. It took one lucky bullet to start the first World
War, but even that uncertain war began with certainty as to who
pulled the trigger. Kennedy died in a hail of singular gunfire;
surrounded by spooks and button-men, patsies and Cubans. The only
thing approaching truth in the whole affair is a car’s upholstery,
pink with misplaced brains.

The British comedian
Stewart Lee is flummoxed by this overload as well, although his case
study is less violent. In the eighteenth century, said Lee, the
number of published books was small enough that a man could
conceivably read them all. So someone did –
a polymath named Thomas Young. Young, Lee says, “read all the
Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology
and all the philosophy and all the science.” His modern equivalent,
however, would have to read “all Dan Brown’s novels, two volumes of
Chris Moyles’ autobiography, The World According to Clarkson
by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson II by
Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson III by Jeremy
Clarkson…

“In short, the man who had read everything published today would be
more stupid than a man who read nothing.”

Which
cuts right to the heart of the matter.

Rick first talks about
information overload in terms of our personal narratives, what we
think of our own journeys through life. He gives the example of a
Native American living in a traditional tribe. Such a man didn’t have
a lot of choice concerning his ultimate identity. A hunter was a
hunter, a priest was a priest. For this imagined primitive, there was
no need to figure out what it meant to be a priest and why it was
important. The modern man by contrast, is racked with doubt.
According to Rick:

“This is not cartesian doubt, you know, this isn’t doubt
brought on by an evil genie who makes me wrong to my clear mind, no,
we doubt in a different way now. We doubt that we could know enough
about the big picture to even make sense [of anything]. I mean that’s
why, you know, one of the battle cries of these lectures will be to
‘just make sense’, because that will be very difficult to do. Because
we will be doing it in a situation in which there is way too much to
make sense about… Even our purest motives get caught up in these
systems.”

This is coupled with
the idea that our intellectual pursuits, at least in the American
vein, have become deflationary. This is now self-evident. Proof can
easily be seen in the artifacts of our generation, which always
emphasize self-actualization over understanding. In Seige, Rickquotes the
anti-foundationalist philosopher Richard Rorty. His article “The
World Well Lost” seemed to Rick a prime example of intellectual
decay. According to Rorty, any problem that has been around for 2500
years and remains unresolved is necessarily and correctly met by the
modern person with the answer: “I don’t care.”

To Rorty the practice
of philosophy was always a selfish one. He was looking for a
philosophical replacement for God, but discovered that one could not
exist for him. From then on he devoted himself to convincing others
to stop chasing absolutes, saying in a 1992 paper “There
is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to
(the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).” In a
sense what he argued for was the pointlessness of rigor, the
emptiness of accomplishment.

Rorty
ended up being right. No universal knowledge remains for my
generation, all of our agreements, our “truths,” are understood
to be idiosyncratic and malleable. Solutions are temporary –
but the problems persist. All of our problems, in point of fact, seem
to have gotten worse at astounding speed since Rorty’s views entered
the zeitgeist. Under this influence, what good is philosophy? What
good is anything other than pleasure and self-confidence?

In another lecture,
focusing on Derrida, Rick articulates a response to this lack of
resolution:

“Derrida’s noticed, as one could hardly fail to notice, that the
history of Western metaphysics has been filled with the attempts to
answer the question “Being is _____” and to fill in the blank,
and if you follow the history of Western metaphysics; Being is the
demiourgos. Being is God, Being is whatever is uncovered by the
empirical sciences, Being is this, Being is non-existent, whatever we
have tried to fill in the blank with we have not yet reached closure.
That’s why I said that philosophy is a funny endeavor, it has a
2500 year history of failure and yet it continues. So obviously it’s
not quite in the spirit of capitalism to engage in this enterprise.
That’s a long time to run a failing business; 2500 years…

That’s the first thing we notice, that you know, the history of
philosophy has not yet presented us with final wisdom, total coverage
and ultimate truth. We know that, so that’s step one…
Deconstructive readings try to work this out in detail case by case.
You know, different attempts to answer it, and how they failed to
answer it. And so deconstructive readings are not a single technique,
or even a special set of techniques; they are more like housework.

“See, philosophy is not like building a house, where you start with
a firm foundation and build it up and you are finished and you walk
off and that’s philosophy. Philosophy under the heading of
deconstruction is housework, which means every day the floors have to
be swept again, the dishes have to be done again, and I’ll be
damned, the next day its just like that again, and its just like that
again, and its just like that again… That is at the heart of – I
think – the best of philosophy in the late 20th Century…
the idea that it’s not getting finished and it can’t be.”

The noise of modernity makes it easy to see
questions of self as distant from the practical necessities of life.
To continue living without studying that living we construct simple
selves capable of surviving the onslaught of context: gamer and
troll, activist and reader, Democrat and Republican. The work is too
difficult, and since there is no longer any pretense of reward for
solving life’s complexities, the contemporary person is encouraged to
adopt lives defined by jobs, tastes, and demographic ranges. An
authentic self is just as good as any “identity,” any combination
of imaginative narrative and costume which may be easily bought,
abandoned, modified or commodified for a variety of obtuse social or
political ends. To quote Rick again:

“We
have life changes now, and they have become… not changes in our
life – for example, to give you… to show you the distance that we
have traveled – not like Augustine’s conversion to Christianity
when he hears, or thinks he hears the voice of God saying ‘tolle,
lege’ – ‘take, read’ – and he reads the scripture and becomes a
Christian and then he is a new man. He is born again. No, no, no,
that’s over now. Now we change, alright.

“We change rapidly. We change, as I said, professions six or seven
or eight times and we change who and what we are the way we used to
change our clothes and our fashion. I mean, there are kids now who
get through college and they are six different people before their
junior year. Two months as a bohemian. Two months as a pre-med
student. Two months as a preppy. Two months as a poet. A month and a
half as a journalist. A month and a half as an ecologist… None of
it felt. None of it part of affect. A fad. A personality
formed as a fad, as a fashion, as an ornament. I mean, this really
doesn’t overstate the case for me.”

What Rick couldn’t
foresee was how society would develop minute stations to support
these fads. On the internet we can legitimize and actualize our
illusions, and crucially abandon them as easily as they are created.
This makes it very difficult, I think, to maintain real loyalties, or
to work hard to become the sort of person you want to be. When
everything travels in waves, there’s no reason to build houses. The
foundations serve no purpose, the tools abandoned.

This view of society
isn’t the whole story, though. On a personal level, between
individuals, we are not so fickle or so gullible. What society does,
even in private, is cast doubt over the entire enterprise of culture.
It makes it seem more transitory, more useless than it actually is.
Often, it makes all of our hopes and ambitions futile. In the words
of Bukowski, “When the final hope goes, there remains but a staring
at the dance and a watching of the feeble intercourse of the idiots,
with very little note-taking.”

My generation doesn’t live beneath Rick’s empty, Godless sky. We live beneath a sky so full of Gods that they have become mundane and meaningless. Our heritage collapses by the generation; my grandfather had America, my father had Texas, I have my father – what could my children possibly receive?

Part 3: The Claim of the Living

It was one week after
Christmas and two weeks before my birthday when Rick died. Our house
had burnt down the year before, so we were living in an apartment
barely big enough to hold Rick, myself, and two of my brothers. It
was the middle of winter break, and the family was up late playing a
card game. In the middle of the game we received a phone call – I’m
not sure from whom – to tell Rick that Mickey had passed away. I
didn’t know who Mickey was at the time.

After that call we
left the game on the table. Rick went to bed, my brothers and I went
outside, and our guests went home. I don’t remember the rest of that
night, just whispered conversations that could make no dent against
the fact of Mickey’s death. I do remember being woken up by Rick
early the next morning. He drove me across town to the campus. He was
supposed to teach that day, and he needed me to run in and tell his
class it was canceled. I don’t know how much Xanax he took that
morning, or why he couldn’t just call the campus. I was too young to
ask questions. Along the way he kept passing out in traffic, drifting
off into other lanes. At the time I was scared to death. Obviously
something was wrong with him, but I had no idea what. I was just a
passenger. Somehow we made it home alive, and I fell back asleep.

The atmosphere in the
house for the rest of the day was too quiet for comfort. No matter
what I tried to do to pass the time it felt wrong or disrespectful.
We got a call in the afternoon from my mom Irene, who had recently
moved back to Austin to be close to us. My older brother Travis
answered the phone and talked to her for a bit before trying to wake
up Rick so they could talk about Mickey’s funeral. I don’t know if I
was already in the room or if I only came in when Travis started
shouting. I don’t remember much about the next two years. Some
flashes of that day would come back to me, but only as gruesome
fragments.

I remember the tarp
they laid his body under. A clinical yellow plastic not quite
covering him. I remember a stain on the carpet, and I thought it was
blood, but where would it have come from? He had congestive heart
failure, they said, or a hole in his heart, where it was fat instead
of muscle. I never really asked, and
I never saw his death certificate. A counselor tried to talk to us in
the house while the crew cleaned up the body. I didn’t hear a word
she said. Words were useless then, as I think they’re useless now.
What could I possibly say that would convey any of the reality of the
situation? I remember looking down, and crying.

We held a service on
our own at the park across the street. I didn’t recognize everyone
who came, and all I can recall are vague impressions of what they
said. Some of them played songs, and I remember especially listening
to Frank Zigal, brother of Tom, play “Bird on the Wire” by
Leonard Cohen. To this day I associate it with my dad. “If I have
been untrue, I hope you know, it was never to you.” I picture him
saying that to me, as if the words were his. Don’t worry, I know. I
don’t exactly forgive you, but I understand.

Almost the whole time I was conscious of my father he was on Xanax and Prozac, drifting in and out of life at random, something less than the stories he told. I’ve seen friends become addicts of every description, and I know what happens to a person. Looking back I can’t say I have any idea how closely the Rick I knew resembled the Rick he had been at Duke University, or at Frank Zigal’s shows, or in Buffalo Gap.

Rick began to die at
Duke, when he was denied tenure in 1993 and essentially fired. It was
the same year that The Self
Under Siege came out on tape. Those who remain romantic
about his history claim that there was no reason for the firing at
all, while more practical people point to the fact that he didn’t
publish as much as he was expected to. The student paper at Duke
published a handful of stories about it:

“On the tenure issue, Roderick said tenure at the University is not given on the stated qualifications of published research, good teaching and community service.

“Some administrators argued that Roderick had not completed enough research in his field to receive tenure. Roderick claimed that, while research works nicely for the Medical Center, no one can research philosophy.

“Roderick said that research is plagiarism and simply means ‘writing books with lots of footnotes.’

“Roderick said that if students want to protest his departure, they can try to force the administration to reverse their decision. Otherwise, he said he will teach next year at a school in Compton in Los Angeles where he will teach adults who have lost their jobs. He did not speculate as to his future plans after that.”

One of Rick’s associates, Doug Kellner, got him a few seminar gigs at UCLA, and he accepted a position at National University, where he was told he would be helping working class people get their degrees. This was little more than a con-job, however: they wanted to legitimize themselves using Rick’s name and reputation, but didn’t care what he taught, or if his students learned anything at all. Duke and National University represented opposite sides of academia, and neither of them saw teaching as an important part of Rick’s identity.

Being rejected by Duke
isn’t what separated Rick from his potential success, it was only a
symptom of his disillusionment. He had considered teaching his life’s
calling, and thought that he had been earning respect for his skill.
Duke and National in turn demonstrated that Rick’s effect on the
student body and their experience meant nothing compared to his
effect on their own reputations. They did not serve humanity; they
fed off it. They fed off him. So Rick gave up.

My mother left him
shortly thereafter, but my three brothers and I remained in Rick’s
custody. We settled back in Austin in 1996, where he taught Sociology
and Philosophy at the University of Texas and Austin Community
College. It was in Austin that he died.

I’m sitting alone in a
diner writing this just about seventeen years after Rick’s death,
thumbing through his copy of T.S. Eliot’s selected poems. Lately his
death feels more recent. Each day that goes by brings it closer.

I’ve carried Rick’s
Eliot with me everywhere I’ve gone since I first read it and added a
few notes to the ones Rick kept in the margins. I lost both the
covers somewhere along the way. When I first picked it up I had
written more poems than I’d read, but I remember the influence of
poetry from a young age. I had a teacher in third grade who
encouraged us to memorize couplets throughout the year. The last of
these was the entirety of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost. It was a challenge I enjoyed, and a poem I can
recite from memory to this day.

When I was a child, I
recited it for Rick. When we were driving through the neighborhood
one day he brought that poem up in conversation and started to recite
it. Wanting to impress him, I interrupted, finishing the verse. He
listened, then critiqued my performance. It was a strange and
bemusing moment between us. That may have been my first real piece of
artistic criticism, and I received it as a mark of respect.

In Bury Me Not,
Rick wrote:

“I would run to the bus with a copy of Robert Frost’s poems stuck
in my catcher’s mitt. I was a big fancier of poetry at the time
and I remember winning a blue ribbon at school for reading ‘Stopping
by Woods on A Snowy Evening’ aloud. I loved the way the words made
me feel, as though very simple things could be important, and all
that little secret life packed into this strange New Englander I
would never know.”

Rick was always
supportive of my writing. Most children, at least of my generation,
could have counted on the unconditional support of their parents in
this endeavor, and there’s a part of me that says Rick was simply a
man of his time. There’s another part, however, that thinks he could
never shut down his critical faculties and give empty praise, even to
his kids. Whatever the case may be, a few years ago I went through
what remained of his old notebooks, and found some lyrics he wrote
when he was twenty that were eerily similar to poems I wrote when I
was fourteen. A rhyming couplet in a verse that never ends.

One our favorite movies
was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There’s a scene when Big Daddy has
just found out he’s dying. He says to his son Brick,“This was what
my father left me, this lousy old suitcase! And on the inside was
nothing, nothing but his uniform from the Spanish-American war. That
was his legacy to me! Nothing at all!” But that’s not the end of
the scene. Brick helps him to see that a man’s legacy is more than
just the offal he leaves behind.

Whatever else he did
with his life, Rick kept us with him. The man is dead. Perhaps the
myth of the man will remain for a while longer, like Big Daddy’s. I
look over these pages and think, “who gives a damn? Who’s going to
care about any of this?” when so many of us seem not to give a damn
about ourselves. I look at myself in the mirror and repeat the
question. I know at least one person did. I reckon I never loved
anything as much as that lousy old tramp.

I’ve listened to all
his lectures now. I’m laying my claim to his death. To his remains.
To his story. When I was younger, I had a huge collection of
quotations, mimicking my father’s. As I’ve grown into this society,
in which there is no longer culture, only the quotations of cultures
past, they’ve started to disgust me a little.

Will the husk of
information I leave behind offer anything in the generations to come?
Is the thought of posterity completely pointless in Rorty’s world,
where heritage is merely an obstacle to invention? Is there anything
to hope for –
anything to fear?

The
lines are fading in my kingdom. Rita is dying. The baptists in
Abilene recite their mossy platitudes. Above their scrap of history,
only an attitude remains. Amazing grace? All uselessness! I have seen
her head [no color any more] brought in upon a platter.

Squint
skyward and listen –
everything in Texas either burns, bites, stings, or hits you heart
high. He would not see me stopping here to watch his cup fill up with
blood. If you wish to protest the firing, I’m sure she’s heard it all
at least a hundred times before. I have tried in my way to be lifted
enough to see a beam of your sun, which banishes Winter. Let us go

then,
you and I. See the sun blotted out from the sky, for which I cannot
hold you totally to blame. Dumbstruck with the sweetness of Being,
’til –
The dishes have piled up, the floor is carpeted with dirty clothes.
Miles to go before –

Where was I? Thieves and fools, picking at this worried mind of mine! An obnoxious odor of mendacity, to prove our almost-instinct almost true. I’m so utterly lost, without you – –

Just
make sense.

The last thing Rick
said to me, in his final lecture, some seventeen years after his
death, was this:

“For
now that’s all –
except be sure and fear death. I mean, that’s important to being
human. Fear death and realize that even if you don’t smoke, and
even if you jog, you are still going to die…
that should come as a great relief to all of you.”

And in short, I am relieved.

7 Comments:

Professor Roderick’s presentations are a skillful blend of academic philosophy and “real life” examples. The joy he projects as he interprets the great thinkers soars above mere lectures: These are playful (yet profound) mental masterpieces. What a marvelous legacy! Thank you for making these gems available.

Rick was an amazing human being. Tough as nails but truly compassionate. He did his philosophy as a real life task. He faced the best and worst in us and in our culture and faced directly the realization that we and culture are mostly the worst. I really appreciate his honesty and I felt less alone in this insane culture because of his lectures. I knew I wasn’t crazy because I could tell he wasn’t crazy. He will surely be missed and his predictions of the postmodern world we were heading into have come true with an ugly vengeance. Happy Trails Rick wherever you are.

I have always felt alone in the world. I didn’t know where to belong. Up to now, i haven’t belonged anywhere. But in philosophy, i have companions. When i found the “Self under siege” lectures, i felt good. I confess to have re-watched them twice. I didn’t know the presenter had died. I am sorry for his passing. His life is inspiring to some of us who don’t know where to belong.

I recently discovered Rick Roderick and, like most, I was blown away by what a talent he had for presenting profound and difficult ideas with clarity and precision while still respecting nuance and complexity. I wish I had discovered him 20 years ago.

I’m wondering if there’s any more information on the documentary about Rick that Kerry Candaele was apparently working on about 10 years ago?

The documentary didn’t work out unfortunately. I am not sure how far they got, however I do know that they got as far as interviewing some of Rick’s family, but ultimately abandoned the project. There is some commentary about it in Max Roderick’s essay which will be published here when Max is ready.

Additional Information

Recent Comments

Raymond Candelaria September 15, 2019 at 2:52 am on AboutWhy is it Marxist and Critical Theory professors have this simplistic rigid interpretation of hierarchical power structures? Sex, race, ethnicity and religion aren't exclusive criteria of hierarchical systems. Social status or class. "You may meet all the above criteria but without an Ivy League degree you'll never get a job in 'The State Department'. Makaveli put it best
there are two groups of people the "great" and the "people". The "great" wish to oppress and rule the "people", while the "people" wish not to be ruled or oppressed.
To think a peasants or surfs benefited fmore than slaves is foolish. Whether be feudal, communism or facsism are collective ideologies that in practicality end just the same, authoritarian rule of a select few at the expense of the masses and benefits those on top of the hierarchy.
The collectivization of private property and mean of production (whatever that means) is to deny the proletariat the fruits of their labor. Capitalism (voluntary exchange) is by no means a perfect solution the collective I Central planning has always had horrible results. If individuals working on their personal interest can't be trusted then how could a person be trusted with sole authority? Marxism, socialism monopolizes what it seeks to aviod. It's an idealistic ideology suffering from a severe
case of psychological projection.

Tingting Zhou August 7, 2019 at 6:32 am on 208 Nietzsche’s Progeny (1991)Thanks for this brilliant and insightful lectures, and thanks for sharing it without boundaries. There are more and more human lives coming to world, and less and less human in its real sense. It’s always unsettling for me that people might eventually stop fighting and give up feeling. Thanks Rick.

Magne August 1, 2019 at 4:25 am on AboutBrilliant! Thanks so much for sharing this!

ctrlshift July 31, 2019 at 2:31 pm on In MemoriumThanks for posting this Max. It was worth the wait.

Ward July 16, 2019 at 7:50 am on AboutI was wondering about the original VHS tapes. Does anyone know if there was ever a release with the Question and Answers? He keeps alluding to question and answer period and I am pretty intrigued. Also, the last video of one of his talks seems a lot shorter at like 33 minutes and cuts out fairly abruptly. Is that intended? I have only found the videos on youtube. Just wondering as I've watched each series at least 3 times completely, if not more and I want to squeeze every bit I can. What a lucid orator, truly appreciate the "for the non-footnoting public" style of talk and the folk-ism style he employs.

Hiram July 9, 2019 at 1:38 am on AboutSome folks really are born posthumously...
In the minds of those they touch.
I feel fortunate to have been "touched" in this way.

Jade Aslain June 7, 2019 at 12:29 pm on 208 Nietzsche’s Progeny (1991)Speaking of "first lines," it should be noted that the phrase "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation or an image," comes from the first line of the *Society of the Spectacle* by Guy Debord.

Fatih Kilic May 16, 2019 at 3:24 am on AboutAmazing! Thanks for sharing your Duke history with us!

Fatih Kilic May 13, 2019 at 11:39 am on AboutHi Marshall,
Sending this message from the Netherlands.
I just wanted to share that I am very grateful that I have found your dad's lecture series. He seems to be an amazing personality! He thought me a lot and I think his voice has been a wake-up call in some way.
I am thinking of sharing his lectures with my professors and have already shared it to some friends, so that more people can enjoy what he has left to the world.
All the very best.

ctrlshift May 10, 2019 at 12:28 pm on In MemoriumThe documentary didn't work out unfortunately. I am not sure how far they got, however I do know that they got as far as interviewing some of Rick's family, but ultimately abandoned the project. There is some commentary about it in Max Roderick's essay which will be published here when Max is ready.